Communication Performance of Java-based Parallel Virtual Machines

Message passing libraries such as Parallel Virtual Machine (PVM) and Message Passing Interface (MPI) provide a common Application Programming Interface (API) to implement parallel programs across multiple computers. Such libraries provide a means to program a collection of normally independent computers to work cooperatively on a single computation. However, for programs written in C and Fortran these collections of machines may provide a heterogenous set of computer architectures, requiring a different executable for each type of architecture. The Java language offers a potentially machine-independent method of distributing the same code to perform the computations on different computer architectures. The communication performance between processors running Java programs is a crucial issue for this type of application. This paper compares the performance between tradition PVM implemented in C code, Java code interfaced to the traditional PVM libraries (JavaPVM), and Java code that per..